Love Letters Research Articles

Review: Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest, by Hanif Abdurraqib

Review: <i>Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest</i>, by Hanif Abdurraqib

Love and breakup letter methodology: A new research technique for medical education.

In everyday life, feelings are important to us, influencing our decision-making and motivating our actions. This is equally true within medicine and medical education, where feelings influence key aspects such as clinical decision-making, empathy, resilience, professional identity, reflection, team dynamics, career choices and questions of prejudice and bias. Feelings are therefore legitimate targets in medical education research, but asking research participants to talk openly about feelings can be challenging for participants and researchers alike. Within the disciple of User Experience (UX)-a relatively new research discipline used in the world of technology-researchers also seek to understand their customer's feelings, which are central to aspects of brand loyalty and choice of software platforms. UX researchers have developed innovative ways to explore feelings, in particular through the use of Love and Breakup Methodology (LBM)-participants are asked to write love and breakup letters to the product or app under study, and the letters are then used to guide the focus group discussion that follows. Methods: In this article, we describe the theoretical underpinnings of LBM, including ontological considerations. We also consider how LBM can be successfully used in medical education research and outline how we have adapted it in our own research studies and programme evaluations. Conclusions: Love and breakup letters are creative ways of understanding participants' positive and negative emotions about the matter under study. LBM has been utilised extensively by UX researchers in technology, but has been little used in medical education. It has rich potential to enhance research approaches to aspects of medicine that are influenced by feelings, including empathy and resilience, team working and many other aspects of professional practice. Although principally a focus group research tool, it can be adapted to other approaches, including questionnaire surveys and individual interviews.

Beethoven Returns to Bonn: Origins, Belonging and Misuse in Mauricio Kagel’s Ludwig van (1969)

In 1969 West Germany, the country was abuzz with anticipation of the approaching Beethoven bicentennial. That year the composer and experimental filmmaker Mauricio Raúl Kagel, born in Argentina to Russian- and German-Jewish parents in 1931 and living in Cologne since 1957, was commissioned by the State to commemorate the momentous occasion. What resulted was a film that surely no West German official had anticipated. Entitled Ludwig van: A Report and strongly inflected by Kagel’s absurdist aesthetic, Kagel’s film critiques the fetish object that Beethoven’s music and person had become in twentieth-century West Germany, touching upon, amongst many topics, East German claims of Beethoven’s “misuse” by the West German government, as well as the rise in the 1960s of the theory that Beethoven was Black. While Ludwig van has been recognized for its sendup of bourgeois music culture, it has yet to be analyzed from the perspective of diasporic experience. Simultaneously a love letter to and deconstruction of Beethoven’s cultural legacy, Ludwig van asks its audience to consider the complex diasporic experiences of avant-garde artists in the wake of WWII. Drawing on work by Brigid Cohen, I argue for the centrality of the theme of migration and displacement in Ludwig van. And in reading two central scenes from the film, I consider, in dialogue with Scott Burnham, what light the fifty-one-year-old film’s critique of the fetishization of origins and genealogy might shed on the celebration of Beethoven’s 250th birthday in 2020, and such acts of memorization more generally. [Please note: This article contains embedded video files. These files cannot be played on all PDF readers. Current Musicology recommends Foxit PDF Reader, Adobe Acrobat, or any other PDF reader capable of reading "enriched" media.]

“Love is calling”: Academic friendship and international research collaboration amid a global pandemic

In this intervention we desire to document and celebrate our own international research collaboration as an intimate long-distance relationship that sustains us amid a global pandemic of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. We share “love letter” poems that we wrote to each other, in response to a poem by Yayoi Kusama titled “Residing in a Castle of Shed Tears,” incorporated into her mirror room installation “Love is Calling.” In our discussion we reflect upon the emotional connections that sustain academic researchers, particularly those relationships that extend beyond national boundaries and conventional heteronormative expectations.

ROMANTICISM IN WS RENDRA’S SURAT CINTA

Poetry is a literary work of two different worlds, the ideal world and the factual world. This research describes the ideal world and the factual world, gap/opposition or equivalent. The method is descriptive qualitative. The research results showed an equivalent and opposition in the poetry of Surat Cinta (love letter) by WS Rendra. The equivalent is seen in the aspects of romance leading to: (1) passion, (2) love, (3) remembered and thought in the heart, (4) restless, (5) worried, and (6) sad. Whereas, the opposition is seen in the aspect of expression in the form of: (1) thoughts with feelings, (2) men with women, (3) love with grief, and (4) sweetly with bitterly. The equivalent and opposition in the poetry of Surat Cinta by WS Rendra as a whole build the integrity of meaning in poetry.

Нова рецепција Милоша Црњанског – десничарске идеје и књижевни опус тридесетих година 20. века

Нова рецепција Милоша Црњанског – десничарске идеје и књижевни опус тридесетих година 20. века

Education of Nuns, Feast of Fools, Letters of Love: Medieval Religious Life in Twelfth Century Lyric Anthologies from Regensburg, Ripoll and Chartres. Ed., trans., and intro. by David A. Traill and Justin Haynes. Dallas Medieval Texts and Translations, 26. Leuven, Paris, and Bristol, CT: Peeters, 2021, xi, 184 pp., 1 frontispiece.

Abstract: One of the hotly debated questions in Medieval Studies has been whether Heloise could have actually written those famous letters to her teacher, lover, and later husband, Peter Abelard. The issue has hinged on the issue that the female voice uses a strongly erotic language and does not shy away from talking about herself in most explicit terms. May that be as is, with the availability and English translation of the Latin poems in the Regensburg, Ripoll, and Chartres collections, the entire argument might gain renewed relevance, especially because here we come across (at least in the first collection) apparentlysome female voices who express their erotic desires.

Cinderella (That Story)

94 MARINA WARNER Cinderella (That Story) • lawyer rang to inform me that my mother had died. I was mentioned in her will, and he needed to discuss matters with me and would come to Mexico City to bring me “my legacy.” I told him I would have nothing to do with it. I considered that story over. But when the call ended, I couldn’t resist looking on the web. I found the notice in a local paper from Lake Geneva: “A mass will be said for the soul of Princess X von X, who departed this life at a clinic near her home on Lake Geneva. No Flowers. Donations to the National Association for the Protection of Children.” Browsing French and German language sites, I then came across a brief report: “Princess X (born Surrey, England, 1922) has died of complications after heart surgery at the Saint Luc clinic, Geneva. She was 85. She married Prince X von X in 1945, in a wedding that seemed to promise , in the post-war wreckage, a new era of youthful confidence, vigor, and beauty. The ragged Cinderella had found her prince; the story of their romance lit up hearts all over a weary world. These hopes, however, were soon crushed as the spirit of revolution took hold and, eventually, deposed the Prince in a coup that cost 37 lives. The royal family—their only child Aurelia was born in 1950—were forced into exile. They wandered throughout Europe seeking support from regimes to whom the Prince was related—at one time his cousins had occupied most of the thrones in Europe—but the regimes’ ideals of national identity and independence meant the Prince’s efforts were in vain. “Five years after losing his throne, Prince X von X died in Rome, under what many considered mysterious circumstances. After his death, his widow the Princess led a wandering life, beloved by gossip columnists and paparazzi. She took up Swiss citizenship in 1965 and settled in a lakeside villa near Geneva. She was a familiar, respected figure, regularly attending church, where the pastor, Father Tomas, remembers her graciousness. ‘She was without doubt our most elegant parishioner,’ he a 95 says. A female member of the congregation adds, ‘Always wearing dark glasses and fur coats from the best Parisian houses of days gone by, she brought to us memories of another era.’” I was always a disappointment to my mother, principally because, from the age of fifteen, I needed glasses and refused to wear dresses or go to the coiffeur. Or, as she put it, sighing with her tiny, sweet, supplicating voice, behave like a girl at all. I left home to go to university—the day I was accepted by distant Edinburgh was the most jubilant of my life. After the storms and fights and horrible rages of my teenage years, I hadn’t seen my mother in the flesh for, it must be, nearly thirty years. Distance and near total silence were the only ways of keeping closed the wounds we’d inflicted on each other. The news of her death was no surprise—she had reached a great age and had always been frail—but still, when the lawyer ended the call, I had to sit down. I drew in a breath and tried not to cry, but my whole throat and heart burned horribly, and I did cry—dry angry tears. The lawyer flew in three days later and told me my mother respected my wish not to be associated with the family, though it distressed her that I had chosen to live under an alias and work so hard and ruin my health in such a dangerous and polluted place as Mexico City. He brought with him a basket, a capacious, strong woven carrier of the sort women traders in West Africa use to transport their merchandise. Very unexpected from someone who preferred Louis Vuitton. “There is nothing of value in it,” the lawyer reassured me. “No family jewels, not that she had any left. Personal papers. Letters, diaries, which your mother kept, it seems, since the beginning until the very end. Love letters.” I flinched. “She told me...

Anticipating the Biden Doctrine for the Korean Peninsula

Since the Biden administration took office, its approach and strategy for domestic and foreign affairs have become the focus of global attention. The new administration’s policy toward the Korean Peninsula is one of the most heatedly debated subjects among policymakers and pundits. The past four years have seen major changes in regional security architecture, the most noticeable of which are dynamics on the Korean Peninsula and intensified China-U.S. strategic rivalry. In this context, a comprehensive overhaul of Mr. Trump’s approach to global affairs is expected under a Democratic administration staffed with foreign policy veterans, and the Korean Peninsula policy will be among the most consequential decisions for Biden’s White House. President Biden’s policy toward Pyongyang will be substantially different from Trump’s approach. A bottom-up, incremental model is likely to replace Trump’s personalized diplomacy marked by flashy summit meetings and “love letters.” Existing sanctions will be maintained until the Biden administration sees substantive results regarding the North’s nuclear and missile arsenal. While keeping up the pressure to coerce Pyongyang back to the negotiating table, President Biden is expected to respond more proactively to Kim Jong-un’s overtures or “provocations” and place a high premium on policy reciprocity. The Biden team will elevate the role of Seoul and Tokyo in its strategic planning and increase trilateral coordination and consultation. Stiff competition is more likely to hinder China-U.S. coordination on the Peninsula. The tone, substance, and results of diplomatic engagement between Beijing and Washington over the nuclear issue in the early days of the new administration will give a foretaste of what could ensue on the Peninsula. Positive initial interactions may generate broader implications for China-U.S. relations, regional stability, and global security at large.

A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill ed. by Langdon Hammer and Stephen Yenser

Reviewed by: A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill ed. by Langdon Hammer and Stephen Yenser William H. Pritchard (bio) A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill, edited by Langdon Hammer and Stephen Yenser (Knopf, 2021), 736 pp. "The last great American letter writer" hazards Stephen Yenser about James Merrill. Since Mr. Yenser is co-editor (along with Langdon Hammer, Merrill's biographer) of these almost 700 pages of the poet's epistolary efforts, his claim is less than disinterested. Still, it's a wholly plausible one to a reader dizzied and grateful for such profusion not to be found on email. Publication of these letters pretty much fills out Merrill's bibliography: collected poems, collected prose, novels and plays, a memoir, and, backing them up, Hammer's 900-page biography of a few years ago. [End Page 626] Merrill joins Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop as recent American poets whose lives and work have been fully represented, and done so with editorial scrupulosity, imagination and wit. Unlike the writer who, anticipating his death, instructs that his letters be destroyed, Merrill preserved both outgoing and incoming correspondence; there is no temptation, reading these letters, to wish them away on grounds of discretion. You don't feel like an intruder into some one's privacy as you read along. His first lover, whom he met while an undergraduate at Amherst College, was the poet and translator Kimon Friar and some of the earliest letters here are to him. Merrill worries that his mother will find out about his same-sex love affair with Friar. An evening with Anais Nin, to whom Friar has introduced him, reassures him, and he writes Friar, now in Greece, that "Everything, now, is balanced, is not what I feared. I am at peace and I love you peacefully + longingly." This first of his love letters—there will be many more with many other lovers—is not such as to give one much pause: nothing in the writing beyond the nervous, guilty, and excited young man caught up in a romance. It occurs on page 21 of the letters, but on page 38, two years later, writing to his best friend and Lawrenceville classmate, Frederick ("Freddy") Buechner, he describes a social occasion in strikingly different and much more interesting language. He had been invited to a New York party, given for the Sitwells (Edith and Osbert) at which the famous photograph of the guests shows such literary luminaries, both arrived and yet to be, as W.H. Auden, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop. Merrill didn't get into the picture, having been relegated with others, momentarily, to a lesser room; but he did get a chance to meet Sitwell, whom he described to Buechner in memorable terms—some of which I shall quote: The first impression, apart from the remarkable face, was one of shapelessness—much bottle-green satin beneath something black and not smooth. Out of this her hands proposed themselves: one holding a drink, this hand largely hidden by an enormous ring, elliptical, agate or tortoiseshell, at whose extremity little more than the fingernail was visible. He then moves to the other hand, preparatory to the "shocking face," Buechner is invited to imagine ("place your palm over your face vertically") by way of determining that it was "very big:" Bending over it to greet her, it could not be seen all at once, as though I were even closer than I was and on the verge of kissing her :… "The mouth was large, the lips thin, their curve arbitrary; the eyes, though finely socketed, small and (perhaps because of the nose's prominence) close together. As though magnetized by [End Page 627] what kept them apart. Colorless and hairless was the entire face, powdered, and in spite of the impression of great age, unwrinkled; a suggestion of thin, brownish hair at the turban's edge. The expression was one of considerable malignity; the manner was kind and restrained; I could imagine her doing many things, lecturing, sleeping, sitting on the john, playing the harp—everything, perhaps, except writing a poem. Perhaps, he thinks later, "she really is her own Collected Works, that...

George Rochberg, American Composer: Personal Trauma and Artistic Creativity by Amy Lynn Wlodarski

Reviewed by: George Rochberg, American Composer: Personal Trauma and Artistic Creativity by Amy Lynn Wlodarski Jonathan Blumhofer George Rochberg, American Composer: Personal Trauma and Artistic Creativity. By Amy Lynn Wlodarski. (Eastman Studies in Music, vol. 154.) Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2019. [xiii, 239 p. ISBN 9781580469470 (hardcover), $99; ISBN 9781787444461 (e-book), price varies.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. In the standard telling, composer George Rochberg’s music underwent a radical stylistic shift following the death of his son, Paul, in 1964. In response to [End Page 69] the tragedy, the once committed serialist rediscovered the expressive riches of tonality; that reaffirmation of traditional harmony, in turn, helped usher in the neoromantic movement among American composers during the latter third of the twentieth century. If the tale sounds a hair too neat, that’s probably because it is: as Amy Lynn Wlodarski’s absorbing biography of the composer makes clear, Rochberg’s relationship with the post–World War II avant-garde and serialism was nothing if not complex. And, if Paul’s early death from brain cancer provided the catalyst for Rochberg to go in his own direction, the seeds for his musical change-of-heart were planted much earlier. Indeed, Rochberg’s musical development reflected a life that was shaped by traumas both deeply personal and global, beginning with his experiences on the front lines in Europe during the Second World War. Rochberg was born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1918, and his musical education included a striking pedigree of teachers, beginning with Hans Weisse and Georg Szell. (Prior to his appointment as music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, Szell taught composition at New York’s Mannes College of Music.) It was from those two that Rochberg developed a formative reverence and appreciation for the standard canon—views that would, in turn, shape his understanding of his role as a composer. His artistic training was interrupted, though, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Drafted into the army in 1942, Rochberg’s rigorous military training (he ended up an officer in the infantry) was balanced by a handful of creative and morale-boosting activities. The latter included composing a set of marching songs for his regiment and listening to broadcasts of orchestral concerts (often with scores sent by his wife, Gene, in hand). Such opportunities ended abruptly when Rochberg joined George S. Patton’s Third Army for the brutal push out from Normandy following D-day in 1944. Here, moments of release and refreshment were fleeting: the joyous reception from newly liberated French citizens, particularly children, loomed large in Rochberg’s subsequent memories of those days. In September 1944, the composer was seriously injured during a firefight near Mons, Belgium, and his lengthy recuperation saw him begin composing again. There is little that reflects his war experiences in the resulting short piano pieces; Wlodarski describes them as “love letters” to the infant Paul. But following a second battlefield wounding in February 1945 and Rochberg’s subsequent discharge from the Army that June, his creative process was increasingly informed by a desire to write music that faced “the realities of the world around me and my relation to that [modern] world” (p. 38). While Rochberg was thoroughly drilled in compositional technique during his postwar studies at the Curtis Institute of Music, his self-motivation shines through the pages of Wlodarski’s book: the diary entries she cites show Rochberg deliberately pushing himself to grow and develop as a composer. Initially, this resulted in the embrace of what he called “hard romanticism”—that is, music marked by “sharp angularities of dissonance” (p. 39). By the early 1950s, though, Rochberg’s convictions had led him to embrace Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method. Rochberg took to Schoenberg’s technique and music with alacrity: “I know of no composer of the twentieth century,” he gushed in a 1952 journal entry, “who has the sense of [the living phrase] as Schoenberg had it” (p. 50). While Rochberg’s enthusiasm for Schoenberg wasn’t exceptional for the [End Page 70] time, his excitement sometimes got the better of him. Wlodarski relates the embarrassing episode surrounding Rochberg’s treatise The Hexachord and Its Relation...

Une identité rhétorique entre personne et personnage : le « je » des Lettres d’amour de Philostrate livre-t-il des indices autobiographiques ?

The first person of Philostratus’ Love letters intrigues the reader : is it the person of the author, or a character constructed by the author ? Through the study of letters where the first person declares himself a foreigner or an exile emerges the idea of a first person which could symbolise the situation of any sophist, and of Philostratus in particular.

Nearing Death: Anticipation and Survival in Gorz, Derrida, and Ricœur

Nearing Death:Anticipation and Survival in Gorz, Derrida, and Ricœur Enda McCaffrey "La mort est maintenant si effacée de nos mœurs que nous avons peine à l'imaginer et à la comprendre."1 I WANT TO BEGIN THIS ARTICLE by referring to a four-minute clip from Xavier Beauvois's film Des hommes et des dieux.2 The film tells the story of an order of Trappist monks living within a Muslim population in Algeria during the civil war in the 1990s. Relations between the two communities deteriorate as a result of an upsurge in fundamentalist terrorism. The monks have to decide whether they should leave the community whose residents they have nurtured and supported or stay in the knowledge that they will inevitably be killed. In this particular scene (their Last Supper), they toast their decision to stay in Algeria and accept their imminent death. The scene is accompanied by the "Swan Theme" from Tchaikovsky's ballet Swan Lake, the final act of which sees Odette and Siegfried accepting their fate by drowning together rather than face, in Odette's case life forever as a swan (and the ensuing loss of love, freedom, and happiness), and for Siegfried a life consumed by guilt over his unwitting betrayal of Odette. The ballet's final apotheosis has the lovers ascend united and deified into the heavens. In both film and ballet, death is anticipated, accepted, embraced, and overcome. I will return to the significance of this scene later. Drawing on an understanding of thanatology as a practice in writing death and dying,3 I want to explore the reflections on death—or more precisely on nearing death—of three French thinkers who composed their final works on this theme. For André Gorz, Jacques Derrida, and Paul Ricœur, death was an experience that they captured in their last writings: death by suicide for Gorz three years after his love letter to his wife in Lettre à D.: Histoire d'un amour;4 death from pancreatic cancer in the case of Derrida a year after his last publication, Apprendre à vivre enfin;5 and death from old age two months after the publication of Ricœur's unfinished work Vivant jusqu'à la mort, suivi de fragments.6 These texts reveal how each writer 'imagined' (thought, forethought, anticipated) their deaths as memento mori. Central to this practice of reflection is its focus on the anticipation of death and how this anticipation reshapes their respective thinking on life and the desire to survive. I want to show how these memento mori can be thought of as memento vivere. [End Page 26] Theory and context This article first came to life as a keynote address at a conference on the theme of the medical and religious imaginary in French literature.7 At the time the focus of my paper was on anticipatory grief. We usually think of grief as that which follows rather than that which awaits. I wanted to explore this understanding of grief further and demonstrate how in the future temporality that is anticipation there exists a continuous present, ethical and religious, that is an imminence and an immanence. In addition, one of the aims of that paper, to be developed further in this article, is that in defining the axis of the medicoreligious imaginary it was helpful for me to think in terms of texts of reparation and a very specific type of reparation in Lazarean textuality where the dying writer is reborn through language. Nearing death invites these writers to question the role of writing: why write, whom to write for, and where lies the value in the act of writing. I also aim to link the experience of anticipation to immanence. Immanence comes from the Latin immanens meaning to "remain in." It is the quality of being contained within or remaining within the boundaries of a person or the mind. This meaning is common within Christian and monotheist theologies. In his Ethics, Spinoza's immanent God was the creator of the world in the same way that an essence creates its own properties.8 The history of immanence is also linked to Christology, the field within Christian theology that deals with...

Historicidade das cartas de amor: circulação de manuais epistolares portugueses no Brasil do século XIX

O presente ensaio sobre a historicidade das cartas de amor portuguesas busca compreender a composição do gênero carta pessoal de amor a partir de sua circulação no Brasil durante o grande século XIX: Secretario Portuguez, ou methodo de escrever cartas (1786), de Francisco José Freire; Mensageiro dos Amantes: Carcaz de Fréchas Amatorias; Manual Epistolar Galante (18--), de Damião Casamenteiro; Secretario Completo dos Amantes (19--), Imp. Lucas andamp; Cª. Com essa investigação, podemos apresentar algumas contribuições para a História da Leitura e da Literatura, ancoradas no paradigma teórico das Tradições Discursivas, no que diz respeito ao gênero textual como objeto de pesquisa. Dada a natureza do trabalho, assumimos duas frentes do referencial teórico: para compreensão da carta de amor como gênero literário, nos apoiamos em Romero (1888), Barbosa (2011; 2012) e Castillo Gómez (2002); para os estudos diacrônicos do gênero, tomamos Kabatek (2005; 2012), Gomes (2007) e Zavam (2009). Com esse ensaio, identificamos que marcas composicionais da carta de amor se mantêm ao longo do recorte temporal, mesmo que haja mudanças significativas de ordens tipográficas, temáticas e de apropriação do sentido do amor.

PROFESIONAL GURU DALAM PENERAPAN PEMBELAJARAN DARING DI TK NEGERI PEMBINA SABAK AUH

Now that there is a pandemic period, more professional teachers will be asked, in order to slow the spread of COVID-19, this pattern demands the role of the teacher. This study aims to review how teachers during the pandemic, who pay attention to aspects of bold learning (implementation, challenges, and solutions). The implementation of courage learning has challenges/obstacles, both from the aspect of human resources, infrastructure, and technical implementation. As a recommendation for the future, it requires public partnership and the involvement of many parties on an ongoing basis. In this case the researcher used data collection in the form of unstructured observations, interviews (unstructured) and documentation. The results of research conducted by researchers at the Pembina State Kindergarten of Sabak Auh have been categorized as good, although there are still a few civil servants that do not make the professionalism of the teacher decrease in the application of bold learning, seen from the teacher's performance in learning in the classroom that is shaded by each teacher: RPPH work, love letters , video creation congratulations brave(on the network).

Tongan Collective Mobilities: Familial Intergenerational Connections Before, During, and Post COVID‐19

Tongan Collective Mobilities: Familial Intergenerational Connections Before, During, and Post <scp>COVID</scp>‐19

Introducing Oceanic Societies in COVID‐19

Introducing Oceanic Societies in <scp>COVID</scp>‐19

«LARGA HE SIDO PERO NO CUANTO DESEO»: LAS MUJERES COMO REDACTORAS DE CARTAS EN LA CULTURA ESCRITA DE LA EDAD MODERNA

This work analyzes the female linguistic behaviour in 17th and 18th century love letters signed by women. These texts are contrasted with others from the same period which were written by men and which are part of the same discursive tradition. In order to achieve reliable conclusions, we contextualize the female figure as the writer of letters ―especially love epistles―, and we locate this discursive mold within the rethorics field. Thus, the preferred features that divide men’s and women’s language are singled out, according to the different parts of the discourse (heading and salutation, exordium, peroratio and farewell). Furthermore, the influence of sociocultural and discursive covariance factors ―which converge in the distribution of the social role traditionally assigned to men and women― is established in a different approach of the same discursive manifestation, which shows no significant variations in the chronological axis of both of the considered centuries.

Samurai and Southern Belles: Interracial Romance, Southern Morality, and the 1860 Japanese Embassy

Abstract The 1860 Japanese Embassy to the United States was the first diplomatic encounter between Japanese and American people on American soil, and sparked a whirlwind of national optimism and cultural fantasy that challenged the linked conceptions of race, masculinity, and power. In a time when interracial relationships were prohibited in much of the United States, seventeen-year-old samurai Tateishi Onojirō, nicknamed “Tommy,” and his rising count of love letters made headlines across America. This article argues that, in 1860, representations of the 1860 Japanese Embassy and Tateishi in daily Southern newspapers were used to further complicate the concept of Japanese masculinity and dramatize the differences between the American North and South. The perceived desirability of American women became a source of pride at the same time interracial encounters between American women and the Japanese embassy threatened American racial hierarchies. Examining how interactions between samurai diplomats and transnational actors challenged antebellum hierarchies of race, masculinity, and power expands the significance of the 1860 embassy to the study of gender and interracial romantic relations, the production of regional identity, and the influence of Tokugawa Japan on antebellum American identity formation.

How medical school alters empathy: Student love and break up letters to empathy for patients.

Medical education is committed to promoting empathic communication. Despite this, much research indicates that empathy actually decreases as students progress through medical school. In qualitative terms, relatively little is known about this changing student relationship with the concept of empathy for patients and how teaching affects it. This study explores that knowledge gap. Adopting a constructivist paradigm, we utilised a research approach new to medical education: Love and Breakup Letter Methodology. A purposive sample of 20 medical students were asked to write love and break up letters to 'empathy for patients'. The letters were prompts for the focus group discussions that followed. Forty letters and three focus group discussions were thematically analysed. The three major themes were: art and artifice; empathic burden; and empathy as a virtue. Students were uncomfortable with the common practice of faking empathic statements, a problem exacerbated by the need to 'tick the empathy box' during examinations. Students evolved their own empathic style, progressing from rote empathic statements towards phrases which suited their individual communication practice. They also learned non-verbal empathy from positive clinician role-modelling. Students reported considerable empathic burden. Significant barriers to empathy were reported within the hidden curriculum, including negative role-modelling that socialises students into having less compassion for difficult patients. Students strongly associated empathy with virtue. Medical education should address the problem of inauthentic empathy, including faking empathic s in assessments. Educators should remember the value of non-verbal compassionate communication. The problems of empathic burden, negative role modelling and of finding empathy difficult for challenging patients may account for some of the empathy decline reported in quantitative research. Framing empathy as a virtue may help students utilise empathy more readily when faced with patients they perceive as challenging and may promote a more authentic empathic practice.